Does GeekShed spy on channels or private messages?

In short, no. We value your privacy and, as a company, we do not store any logs of any conversations, private or otherwise. There are a few exceptions which I shall explain below:

All network staff log the channels that they are in and the private messages that they receive. These logs are typically for the sole reference of that staff member but may be shared with parties who have sufficient jurisdiction to obtain them, if required. We may also call upon users to voluntarily provide logs of channels or private messages, if required.

GeekShed operates a spam filter to help keep the network safe from spam. When the spam filter is triggered, the user who triggered it is always notified. In addition to this, network staff are notified of the violation and are provided with the full message that triggered the spam filter. This helps us to identify sources of spam and quickly remove these from the network.

Very rarely we are forced to run our services package in debug mode on the live network in order to diagnose and fix problems with it. This causes all messages seen by services bots to be placed in a debug log. Messages that are logged are private messages to services (e.g. identification to NickServ) and channel messages in any channel with a BotServ bot assigned. We will always notify you when services are going into debug mode.

All unauthorised messages to OperServ are logged. This is mostly so we can help users who might be looking for another command as there’s very little reason to attempt to use OperServ, except in error.

All messages sent through services bots with “/bs say” or “/bs act” are logged. This is the default behavior of our services package but is something that we are looking to change soon.

Posts such as “ADVISORY: How to tell if your Unrealircd network is spying on you” found here are simply ignorant scaremongering. GeekShed has modules which hook into channel and private messages – for example, we have a module to block private messages when umode D is set. These modules are all in the interest of our user’s security and suggesting that hooking into channel and private messages inherently means that a network spys on its users is just silly.